1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to collaborative computing systems and, more particularly, to embedding different types of files into a document, converting the document to a Rich Multi-Media (RMM) format, and sharing the converted document in a collaborative computing system.
2. Related Art
Traditional collaborative computing tools allow computer users at different locations to communicate via a computer network and share documents or applications stored and/or executed on one of the user's computers. While both peer-to-peer and client-server communication models have been used in the past, web-based collaborative tools generally employ a client-server model.
For example, client-server application sharing (also discussed in the context of “distributed computing”) is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,434,852 “Distributed Processing Architecture for Control of Broadband and Narrowband Communication Networks;” U.S. Pat. No. 5,887,170 “System for Classifying and Sending Selective Requests;” and U.S. Pat. No. 6,038,593 “Remote Application Control for Low Bandwidth Application Sharing,” all incorporated herein by reference in their entireties. Other group communication techniques are described by Ulrick Hall and Franz J. Hauck, “Promondia: A Java-Based Framework for Real-time Group Communication in the Web,” Proceedings of Sixth International World Wide Web Conference (Apr. 7-11, 1997); Lane Boyd, “Taking Collaboration Into Orbit,” Computer Graphics World, Vol. 21, No. 9, p. 36 (September 1998); and Eric Ly, “Distributed Java Applets for Project Management on the Web,” IEEE Internet Computing Online, Vol. 1, No. 3 (May/June 1997), all incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Standard T.120 is a family of open standards that provides both communications and applications protocols to support real-time multipoint data communications for collaboration and conferencing, among other uses. This standard is outlined in “A Primer on the T.120 Series Standard” by DataBeam Corp. (available at http://mail.symuli.com/t120primer/t120primer.html), incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Traditional collaborative tools, however, are limited in the types of documents that they allow to be shared. For example, a Word® document may be shared, but the document typically only contains text. That is, traditional collaborative tools do not allow sharing of documents with embedded custom objects. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved collaborative computing system.